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CONSERVATION CORNER
(For the week of July 7, 2008)
Supremes Rule On Guns
by James L. Cummins

About 10 days ago the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in a decision written by Justice Scalia, a frequent hunter to Mississippi, which determined that the Second Amendment of the Constitution guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms.

In March, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in striking down the District's gun ban, held in Parker, et al., v. District of Columbia that “The phrase ‘the right of the people’... leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual.” This was the second time in recent history that a federal circuit court upheld the longstanding belief that the Second Amendment was an individual right. In 2001, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in the case of U.S. v. Emerson that “All of the evidence indicates that the Second Amendment, like other parts of the Bill of Rights, applies to and protects individual Americans.”

The mayor of Washington, D.C. filed an appeal to the Supreme Court, setting the stage for the high court to rule. According to FBI statistics, Washington D.C., with its gun ban, maintains one of the highest per-capita murder rates in the country.

This decision reaffirms the wisdom of our founding fathers in creating the Bill of Rights to protect and preserve individual rights, the cornerstone of our democracy. Furthermore, this decision solidifies an historical fact, the common sense understanding that governments have powers, not rights.

The importance of having a uniform and legally accepted definition of the Second Amendment is particularly important to many Mississippians. The firearms that we use are the means through which our Second Amendment rights are realized. Clearly sportsmen, hunters, responsible firearms owners and the industry are all heavily vested in this ground-breaking ruling.

Though this decision is the first time that the High Court has declared in absolute terms that the Second Amendment is an individual right, the nation’s leading historians, legal scholars and constitutional experts have long been on record supporting such a conclusion. Renowned scholars, including Lawrence Tribe of Harvard, Akhil Reed Amar of Yale, William Van Alstyne of Duke and Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, have been vocal in their assertion that the Second Amendment, like all the other rights of the people recognized in the Bill of Rights, secures an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

This decision lays to rest the argument that the Second Amendment is not an individual right and marks the beginning of the end of repressive gun laws that have infringed upon individual liberty and done nothing to make America safer.